We come into this world with an intuitive sense of things. For instance, we don't need an education to understand that we need food to satisfy our hunger and water to quench our thirst. We even come with an intuitive sense that there is something perverse about harming another being, and that there is something real and beautiful about the bonds we create. However as modern human beings our world is mostly governed by our intellect. With it, we navigate the world based upon our beliefs regarding reality and our ideas of what we need to live a fulfilling life. The foundations of our thought processes begins at a very young age, and we inherit our beliefs from our immediate environment which includes our family and our local community. Even the most free-minded person is not immune from the molding forces of their society's culture. Soon we find that we have become a collage of our experiences which are themselves subject to the environment we have grown up in.
And yet within us remains the same spirit that we were born into this world with. This spirit drives us to want to fulfill a deep desire that is unquenched by superficial pursuits such as wealth, power, popularity and all these things we have learned to love based upon the temporary satisfaction it gives us. This deep desire is one for meaning.